Open Letter: Why I, Kevin Kofler, am not rerunning for FESCo

[Peter Hutterer]

On Tue, May 04, 2010 at 12:36:25AM -0400, Matt McCutchen wrote:
> On Tue, 2010-05-04 at 14:20 +1000, Peter Hutterer wrote:
> > I resent being called an imaginary user. Being imaginary would seriously
> > screw with my weekend plans.
> 
> So tell us whether you take the stance on updates that is imputed to the
> so-called "imaginary users".

Sure, anything to get out of this imaginary state.

- I'm quite happy with the package update policy, and I certainly don't want
  it to be more adventurous. Things break occasionally and that's fine, but
  anymore would reduce my productivity.

- Having updates change my UI during a stable release cycle annoys me.
  Because the last thing I need on a busy morning is to figure out how the
  new UI works when what I really need to do is sift through my email.

- I don't have a problem with minimum timeframes or stable karma. Because
  I've screwed up in the past pushing directly to stable, so these days I
  just send everything to updates-testing, even if I know nothing can
  possibly screw up.

- IMO, being a maintainer for users goes two ways - I do the packaging work
  for them and try to fix their bugs, they do the koji voting for me. 
  If they don't, then they'll just have to wait until I get the nag mail
  that reminds me again.

- I used to hardly ever get enough karma to auto-push to stable and given
  the packages I maintain that was purely because users didn't bother to
  vote. I certainly have enough users. So far the world has failed to end
  because of lack of koji votes.

- I now get enough karma to push to stable most of the times. I don't think
  the number of users has changed dramatically recently, so the only reason
  why I'm getting karma now is because people are putting in the effort.
  Good, that's how it's supposed to work.

- I didn't vote in the fedoraforums poll because I trust FESCo to make sane
  decisions without me having to randomly trawl forums to make sure I can
  influence their decisions. So far that worked out for me. YMMV.
  (Also, I didn't really notice the poll until the matching thread on
  fedora-devel was already well into lala land.)

- Most of the people I talk to and work with have a sanity level in the
  upper 50%. So even if there was to be a policy to prevent A, enforce B and
  require C, I'm sure I can convince the right people to work around it in
  a real emergency.
  (Such as telling a user to have a koji voting party to get the package
  pushed into stable quickly (and that update probably got the highest votes
  of any of my packages ever :). Just tell your friends it's like a Win 7
  release party, that'll get the spirits up.)

I've been mostly watching the flamewars about packaging policy and how
Fedora is going to fall apart if we adopt this and that strategy to
determine out whether it's me living in an alternative universe or most
everyone else. Because while I agree that the process we have can be
improved, there's a certain amount of drama visible that seems rather
unnecessary.
 
Cheers,
  Peter